Staff ML Engineer

Company Description

Every company in the world will offer human intelligence-level sales conversations to all of their customers. Spara is building AI agents to handle this explosion of inbound sales touchpoints. This is one of the most complex, high revenue-generating, and high brand risk problems that companies are looking for AI solutions in.

Our Total Addressable Market is $28B: 1M+ US sales reps will be replaced by AI-powered conversations, with technology capturing 30% of their economic value today. Our MVP targets the 192k US companies using a top 6 CRM: 2% adoption at $45k annual recurring revenue is an achievable $173M annual recurring revenue by 2026. We are building a multi-billion dollar AI-first company.

Spara has raised $15M from top-tier venture capital firms, led by Radical Ventures & Inspired Capital; AI luminaries including the founders of PyTorch and Google Cloud TPU, as well as the Head of Sales at Anthropic and Head of Platform Sales at OpenAI; and C-suite angel investments from early customers, including multiple $100M+ revenue businesses.

David Walker and Zander Pease are a proven, complementary founding team. David was co-founder/CEO of Triplemint, where he ran training, coaching, and operations for a 250 person sales team. He grew the company to successful acquisition and now sits on the board of The Agency RE, a $250M revenue business. Zander was the technical co-founder of Nomad Health, now a post-Series D company; he most recently ran Platform at Hyperscience AI, building a workflow orchestration layer for computer vision models.

Job Description

We are seeking a Staff ML Engineer with a passion for building application-layer AI for high consequence, complex user interactions.

In this role, you will:

• Ideate, design, and run experiments to improve Spara's AI behavior across multiple dimensions.

• Prompt engineer, finetune, and orchestrate a pipeline of third party models.

• Manage a pipeline of synthetic and live customer data sets.

• Provide input on the design of Spara's proprietary model pipeline to achieve core product roadmap goals.

• Stay up-to-date with industry trends and best practices, especially relating to nascent AI-native application development, to drive innovation and technical excellence.

• Foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement within the engineering organization.

• Help mentor other team members.

• Report to the VP of Software Engineering.

Spara is built with a cutting-edge stack:

• FastAPI, React / Typescript, Vite, tailwind

• Multiple foundational models, including OpenAI, along with pgvector

• Langchain and evaluation frameworks in Langsmith

• Google Cloud, Docker

Qualifications

• 6+ years experience architecting and building large-scale machine learning projects

• Strong technical background and understanding of software development and machine learning methodologies, tools, and technologies across the stack.

• Experience working in a lightweight, early-stage environment and helping to define solutions in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity.

• Strong problem-solving and decision-making abilities.

• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to effectively collaborate with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science with a concentration in Machine Learning. PhD optional.

• 3 days per week in our Manhattan-based office. Optionally work from home on Wednesdays and Fridays.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and comprehensive benefits package.

• Opportunities for professional growth and development.

• Work-life balance and flexible work arrangements.

• Collaborative and inclusive work environment.